My hometown broke its 100-year Democratic streak. What can that teach us? - WaPo EJ Dionne
Every Thanksgiving, Fall River ranks high on my gratitude list. The venerable mill town in southeastern Massachusetts imparted many of the values I still hold dear. It’s a place where solidarity among family, friends and neighbors matters greatly — and where politics has always been both a great sport and a matter taken very seriously. But this year, I write about my hometown because it made a certain kind of history. The Fall River I remember growing up in — an old-fashioned labor Democratic town, a stronghold of New Dealism where unions once thrived — voted for a Republican president for the first time in 100 years.
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Paul Coogan, the city’s current mayor, supported Harris but sensed the city was ready to flip. “I was riding around and seeing all these Trump signs, and I said, ‘Wow, this is different!’” Coogan told me. He summarized the emotion behind support for Trump with one word: “Anger.” “There’s such a level of skepticism in Fall River about politicians, including me,” he said. “There’s very little trust.” The anger Coogan sensed has been gestating for a century. Fall River was once a major player in the nation’s economy, and its cotton mills made it an “American Textile Colossus.” But the colossus collapsed in the 1920s as the mills headed to the South. The city’s economy never fully recovered.
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In the years after the Depression, the city got another go at textiles as shops making shirts, sweaters and dresses moved in, largely from New York. Unions — the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the International Ladies Garment Workers, the Textile Workers Union — became embedded in the community and its politics. But that industry went offshore and the private-sector unions were left decimated. Lambert sees the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement under President Bill Clinton as the origin of Fall River workers’ sense “that the Democratic Party has abandoned them.” Clinton was very popular in the city at the time, and the late 1990s saw “short-lived success in certain industries,” Lambert said. But as better-paying jobs disappeared, “the anger over that loss of opportunity” grew.
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There is a terrible irony for Democrats in hemorrhaging working-class votes despite the Biden-Harris administration’s resolute focus on blue-collar concerns. The administration’s big investment programs were aimed at creating jobs in left-out regions, particularly for people without college degrees. Their labor and trade policies were designed to lift up the sorts of people Biden grew up with in Scranton and Delaware — and I grew up with in Fall River. But investments take time to be felt, and Biden’s efforts, Lambert said, were “obscured by grocery prices and the cost of living and rents going up.”
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